NEW YORK — Meredith Monk has been creating, performing in, and recording multi-disciplinary music-based performances for more than 60 years. A singer and composer, she has created instrumental and vocal music, films, installations, and operas. Signal works include Education of the Girlchild: An Opera (1973), Dolmen Music (1981, recording) Book of Days (1988, film), Atlas (1991, opera), and now Indra’s Net (2010-2021).
Monk’s idiom grew out of New York’s experimental art world of the 1960s and 1970s; she continues to work in a recognizable and hypnotic post-minimal style exploring themes of myth, sustainability, history, spiritual quest, and connection. Her work has been recognized and supported by the MacArthur Foundation, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, the French Legion of Honor, and the White House (2015 National Medal of Arts).
At age 81, she returned to New York recently with the U.S. premiere of Indra’s Net, a large-scale performance piece and installation for eight singers, small chorus, 18 instrumentalists, and video. How does the work of an iconic creator who came of age during New York’s free-wheeling artistic counter-culture hold up in today’s challenging classical-musical scene? A performance schedule that was expanded to a dozen shows “due to popular demand” promised an eager audience. The packed house at the Park Avenue Armory on Sept. 27 fell under the spell of Monk’s magic and responded with enthusiastic joy.
The metaphor of Indra’s Net came to Monk in 2010 while she was working on another piece about Indra, a benevolent Hindu/Buddhist super god, conceived of a net covering the entire universe, with an infinitely faceted jewel at each intersection of the web.
Interconnection is the primary theme: While the music gestated for many years, rehearsals began in 2020, just as the pandemic lockdown began. To bridge the isolation of that period, Monk created Zoom performances of some of the music. The completed work was performed in concert in 2021 at Mills College at Northeastern University in Oakland, Calif., which commissioned the work, and fully staged at the Holland Festival in 2023 before coming to New York for its U.S. premiere.
Monk originally conceived Indra for the Park Avenue Armory Drill Hall, an impressive space where any performance begins well before the first note. The audience entered the vast hall from behind the bleachers, which were arranged around a shiny white circle dimly lit in blue; statue-like figures in black posed in corners of the hall. An in-the-round configuration left much of the hall dark, emphasizing spatially the experience of “vastness and intimacy” that the composer describes in a program note.
Above one edge of the circular playing space hung a large, round screen, onto which were projected black-and-white photos of ensemble members shown in profile or tumbling languidly across a field of white. A recorded loop played short, slow-moving musical fragments: soft choral humming, bits of flute, cello, oboe, organ. This sound and light installation was “Rotation Shrine,” a hypnotic prelude to the main event.
After the prelude ended, eight figures in black — the Mirror Chorus, seen on the way in — quietly moved to floor cushions stationed around the edge of the stage. They would sing, unamplified, to reinforce a few larger ensembles, and process around the stage. The 18 instrumentalists were arranged in four groups flanking the video screen, in near darkness. As harp and oboe launched a meditative motif, joined by marimba and flute, eight figures dressed in white, the Vocal Ensemble, including Monk herself, wandered one by one onto the playing space and sat on low stools placed in a line. The music changed, and the seated singers silently performed ritual semaphoric movements, crossing and uncrossing their arms with their neighbors. After a few moments, the music changed again, and three of the singers stood to sing: first Monk solo, then two women, who conversed in wordless syllables as Monk watched them.
At first I took careful notes, trying to record ritual movements, shifts in scoring, intensity, lighting, movement. But Monk’s conceptual universe defies the urge to analyze, so I gave up and closed my notebook. For 90 minutes, Vocal Ensemble members took turns singing alone, in shifting pairs, or in chorus, accompanied or a cappella. They wandered the stage, swayed, circled one another, performed a playful round dance, processed around the stage’s perimeter, sat to listen to the instrumentalists, or lay on the floor. Colorful lighting swelled and faded. At one point, two percussionists joined the octet and stepped out to hold an energetic “conversation” between clacker and spoon.
Monk’s distinctive musical language bypasses tonality and traditional methods of musical organization and development. For Indra’s Net, she deployed a series of fragmentary motifs (one of which recalled the aliens theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind), with repetition and layered textures building a distinctive sound for each section. Monk uses the voice as an instrument: Instead of language, the singers emit syllables (la, na, oooh, eh…), clicks, whistles, grunts, and any other imaginable sound that can emerge from the mouth. The eight members of the Vocal Ensemble have distinctive and expressive voices; half of them have worked with Monk for 30 years or more and have learned how to convey an individualistic but cooperative “vibe.” If a solo singer faltered, it seemed an expression of human variability rather than a fault. Monk herself took many of the solos, her voice sounding remarkably fresh.
Even without a discernible narrative, each section was long enough to convey a mood but short enough to stave off restlessness; there was enough variety in texture and energy to hold interest. Overhead, still or video images from nature were projected onscreen, most dramatic in the abrupt shift from “Anthem’s” final blackout, to “Rotation,” which started with bare tree branches projected onto the bright white screen and onto the floor, where the Vocal Ensemble lay in a row. Before the red branches turned black, they suggested a network of blood vessels,
As the performance progressed, spotlights illuminated the instrumental soloists, who stood to play, and even joined the vocalists onstage. By the end, most of the instrumentalists had come onto the now brightly lit stage, filling the space in a grid pattern suggesting the intersections of an invisible net. From dark to light, from isolation to ensemble, interconnection was revealed in sound and sight.
Leaving the performance, one could stop to experience “Offering Shrine,” a crowd-sourced collection of mundane objects — a rock, a baseball, an IV assembly, a tangerine — displayed on a table under a video slide show of hands offering the objects like gifts. These items had been submitted for gallery curation by individuals for whom the objects held meaning; the installation was exhibited at a gallery in Munich in the spring of 2024 and reproduced online. I lingered for only a moment, preferring to hold on to the soothing, meditative spell as I floated out into the night.
